“‘Well,’ he said. ‘Squeeze it like you love it. Nice and easy. Squeeze that trigger like it’s everything you love. You do, as a gentleman, believe in love? You do love something, right, son?’
“‘Yes sir!’ barks I.
“And two months after this particular shooting lesson, it happened. The Yankee I mentioned, one rendered an easier target by virtue of his bright watch chain and silver-blond curls, he walked directly my way. ‘Go back,’ I cried. ‘Go back or I’ll definitely have to, probably.’ Well, he did not. I studied him along my sight—my hands they shook so. I was all but spastic, I was. The noise out there alone. I was in a hole and I let my musket’s stock rest on the lip of the hole. Dirt at least was stationary except during jolts from the artillery breaking all around us. ‘I am going to count to ten, or else.’ I yelled it and he heard me too. I saw him hear me. Why didn’t he stop then? I would’ve preferred that, I would have infinitely preferred not to hurt anybody. I hadn’t previously. A flea I really wouldn’t’ve. Ask anyone local from before. I maintain that few people really want to, few of those who kill actually plan it. I begged that he not force me. He had a chance to go in any direction but my direction. But here he came. My finger, though in place, knew it absolutely couldn’t. Even as it closed on metal, no, it simply could not. Unworthy of me, of my people. How harmless to contract the central joint of your right index finger. Here, you all try that, up and down this splendid table, let me see. Fine. I like to view others doing that in our present peaceful time. Ladies especially. You, madam, on the end, might I see your pretty forefinger do one minor little crooking? And the freckled little girl down there. Thank you. Yes, that helps. More claret for anybody else? It’s really nothing, is it?—curl one digit inward.—There’s a moment when you simply can’t. It is followed by the moment when you know, to live you must.
“Oh my. I do seem to be holding forth here, do I not? Forgive me, mustn’t really. Unlike myself. I know better. I was thirteen years old. It was difficult but also simpler maybe. Hard to explain. You should have been there. But, No. What am I saying? You shouldn’t’ve been there. I should not have been.—Here endeth the lesson as they say on Church Street. I’ll stop. Sorry. Growing garish in my waning years here.”
Other diners did want to hear the rest.
This was at the Mayor’s and it was late. The company was reasonably civilized and so the company begged for it. After sips of claret and several reassurances, he continued his murdering, his telling us it.
This beginning, spoken after dinner, during coffee and cigars, soon brought three black servants to a standstill at the table’s edges, made certain ladies sit more forward—not caring how candlelight might show off the defects of a person’s doubling chins and the crepe under your eyes. His telling the rest, it made men toy with watch fobs or cuff links, needing to be occupied, manually. The gathering had asked Marsden to continue, right? Probably it’d be better for him too. Men who hadn’t gone to war felt shy about that now. Ones who had, they sat here beginning to remember things they’d chose not to, not inside Falls’ city limits, which meant safety and a lawn-green truce. Nobody rose during the rest of Captain’s sad little tale, nobody mentioned babysitters or went home early. Instead they kept very still and still more still. They took it like a medicine, a purge. This man was a big man, but the intimacy of what he admitted for all of us to hear, it was too huge even for so quilted a gent. But it sounded girlish, murder. Sounded personal. His tales were about how killing somebody kills the killed one—that’s plain enough—but more about how the one that kills is killed then inch by inch, whittled down—even during a season when such killing is commendable. So, this handsome fellow was a killer, yet his table manners stayed right good throughout. In ending, Marsden turned to the sissified civilian and said, “So, sir, a body’s being genteeel, sir, doesn’t really figure in, sir, as I have suggested. Everybody here? forgive my going on. It is the anniversary of Antietam. That’s what did it to me, I fear.”
WILL had departed Falls the hushed and uglier pal of a perfect sleek little soprano. Now, grown, minus the friend, once he quit being a ventriloquist’s dummy and finally found his voice, it worked.
Came the day he hit thirty-six, November 1885 (he was a Scorpio all over, sugar—whether you credit that mess or no), ex-Private Willie Marsden had been advanced by his excellent memory and a better imagination up to officer already. (Me? I was off somewheres getting myself diaper-trained.) By the time the century changed (oh, honey, we had such hopes for this one!), one rickety little private had been turned into a brassbound captain. His having money helped. Willie’s daytime hush made his evening speaking voice seem more a event. The years had promoted Private Marsden, those and his way with his war’s rude lore.
All his: “The Shoe Fits,” “When the Colors Changed,” “The Tailor and the Leg,” “Sherman’s Barbequeing Mother,” a couple dozen others—I yet have them all by heart. Thinking back on his roster of favorites, it feels to Lucy here like Captain Marsden’s bruise-gray Hit Parade. I can yet sing each tune—his way and mine.
One such—more or less in his own pitch and manner—still runs:
The Tailor and the Leg
IMAGINE escaping from prison by walking through its open doors and you ain’t even running. Guards let you loose for playing like it’s regular: getting everything on earth you want. My husband, thirteen, plus a sidekick got chucked into a Yankee fortress. Escape, Willie told me later, seemed a form of flying at ground level. The hum of the world—river’s running, bugs at click—seemed alarms that were about to screech news of your getaway but somehow didn’t and became chums, pulling for you.
You’ve heard it said of some friend, “He’d give you a arm and a leg”? My husband claimed: The worse times are, the better friends you make. Lately when I read the newspapers, I figure we must be living through the golden age of buddyhood. Moral is: Hold on to your friends. You sure need them now.
AT WAR, Willie was a kid who said very little and feared very much. The more spooked he got, the fewer words he risked. He soon seemed mute. Big-eyed, he took in all the sights. Bodies stacked like cordwood, human hair snagged on barbed-wire fences: Those would scare anybody witless. His best hometown friend had just been shot. Wee Willie yet wandered in the haze from losing Ned. Our living boy had new beaverish adult teeth, a tendency to trip, and this squinty grin that tried to ward off harm. However charming, a smile cannot make friends with minié balls.
After his pal’s death, Will found a new favorite in one Corporal S. Smith. This tailor-farmer hailed from North Carolina too. At forty, Salvador Smith was redheaded, moved all gangly, and had fathered six girls he talked about a lot. If you didn’t watch him, he’d show you his daughters’ daguerreotypes right during battle. Seemed like being a father—far from home—Sal had all this leftover guarding energy. Most of it he offered to my shivery cheerful Willie. Each night, before Corporal Smith could get to sleep, he made a walking tour of camp. He did it the way he’d checked on outbuildings and the barn of his sweet-potato farm near New Bern, North Carolina. Sal Smith would stop by Willie’s tent, would ease two feet from the boy’s cot and stand there listening hard for sleep’s steady breathing. Sal liked to consider he’d someway “adopted” a young fellow soldier. Just made things more interesting, gave you this extra stake. (The world is full of our unofficial “chosen” children, child.) Sal Smith kept such attentions secret—but Willie was awake while Sal stood guard. The boy would fake mildish snores. And as can happen, in acting asleep to soothe your nearest well-wisher, a body sometimes drifts right off.
WILL forever loved Sal Smith for how—captured together—they got loose so perfect.
Simple: the two were on a stranger’s farm chasing chickens to fill the company pot. Nothing more glamorous than that, nothing less necessary. Suddenly, where two cornered brown hens should be, twelve boots—connected to six Yanks and, higher, six muskets aimed. “Nobody home but us chickens. Come with us, gray boys.”
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The Yanks’ prisoner-of-war camp was due south of Charlottesville. A girls’ academy had been turned into this fort of bars and baffles. Led in, hands raised, the Rebs were brought before one Major Digby. He was all oratory and side whiskers. (Not to be confused with the General Burnside that barbers later named the sideburn for.) As Digby grilled the two about encampments, fortifications, their names and civilian jobs—how they might be most useful as prisoners—fellows studied the Major’s nasty uniform. A rip run crosswise, opening his tunic. Though Digby wore dyed-to-match blue long Johns underneath, he did look real shabby. Plus, his bare left knee played peekaboo through holes.
Smith said, “Home, I was the best non-Chinese tailor in New Bern, sir. I could salvage anything. I do mean anything,” and he stared so hard at the scapegrace outfit, Digby finally went, “Oh, yes. Well. I once was a very particular dresser. Owned twenty stickpins, none less semi-precious than a tiger’s eye. Now, down to this. It’s the times, boys, it’s these times …”
Smith winked. “While I’m in here (though I don’t plan to stay long), let me set this rag aright for you, sir. Only thing I hate worse than spiffing up one of our finer-looking enemy officers is idleness. Ask Willie here. Why, I’m not just un-lazy, sir, I’m counter-lazy. Ask Will. Will?”
But Digby had opened a Bible. He explained the oath of Federal allegiance he was now bound to administer. Smith fidgeted and glared and said things loud. Willie studied his jumpy friend. Back in camp, Smith kept pretty quiet. To fellow enlistees, Smith always acted kind and mild, sewing on their buttons no matter how ornery each hellion was. But one thing Salvador Smith could not abide: a officer, any officer. If Sal hated Reb officers, he was all but boiling whilst this Digby yammered about reforming unregenerate Southerly hooliganism.
The room was filled with guards and muskets. Sal Smith tried getting around the desk to offer Digby a jolly back pat. When pistols discouraged this, the Corporal went, “Sir, was it Dickby, Digby? Us Southerners sure did give you ragged-looking Yankees a perfect conniption fit at Manassas, didn’t we, though?” The Major called this insolent, especially from a man about to swear the Union his undying loyalty.
Digby’s lecture rolled on when Smith butted in again: Us Rebs sure wiped you-all’s noses in it at Manassas, huh?
Guards grabbed Smith, they held his hand onto the Bible. Oath finally done, Smith sweated and shook like a man forced to take poison. “Sir?” he asked, shivering, right hand still in the air. “Am I a good Yankee now?”
“I dearly hope so. They claim the Bible has unlimited power.”
“Well, Major, Yankee to Yankee, didn’t them Rebs just whup the living hell out of us at Manassas?”
Two days later on a inspection tour, Digby bobbed into Smith and Marsden’s straw-lined cell. It’d been a classroom. A map of the world was painted on one wall. You could see that rich girls had daubed up each and every ocean. Just the word “Persia” in red cursive was a poem that filled a fellow with careful feelings. It made Sal Smith speak at length about six daughters’ quirks and merits. The Major wore a even worse-looking uniform, carried the other tossed over his arm. “I wonder … in view of your professed sartorial ability and since nobody else here can …” Digby passed Smith the tatters, plus one needle and a spool of thread. “Scissors, you will understand—gent to gent—are simply not possible, under the circumstances.”
“Say no more. Now my fun starts.” Smith grinned. “Anything beats idleness, even helping out one of my fellow blue-bellied yellow-backed Yanks. Sir, you won’t recognize this rag when Salvador Smith gets through with it.”
“I suppose I should thank you.”
Next morning, just past dawn, one dapper red-haired major of the Northern medical corps strolled away from camp. He led a young prisoner-assistant. This wandering officer acknowledged the gateway sentinel’s salute, but he paused. “I seem to detect, Private, a touch of the pinkeye. Not good. Report to my tent during sick call at nine sharp. That clear, son?”
The guard saluted, then rubbed his eyes. “You know, I thought they were burning.”
Next, the doctor and his aide wandered unarmed nearer Southern lines. Smith soon stripped so the uniform wouldn’t get him kilt—he felt relieved to appear nearly naked and less a officer for that. Then the blue monogrammed jacket was carried to camp and hung outside the headquarters tent—a trophy. That whole day, Sal and Will—centers of attention—were considered clever as possible. “Tell us it again,” troops asked.
The Private and the Corporal felt huge, reborn. My husband explained to me how: While you escape from what seemed your surefire doom, adrenaline makes the world almost too beautiful to bear. Overample brightness burns so far into your eyes it scratches your skull’s inside rear curve. Light hangs over every tree and hillside like some stray fuel that you might gather in your arms and maybe eat. A thirteen-year-old boy, walking beside his trusty friend, felt like he was, oh, maybe a brand-new velvet pincushion, nearbout wanting shafts of steel in him. Nothing seemed too hard for you to stand. Pain would maybe register as pleasure, the way—leaving both school and jail—your first sight of a wet pretty woods at dawn came in, so new-looking it almost carved you up with tenderness.
Return was all grace and celebration.
Was the very morning my poor Will got shot.
THE skinny pip wandered out of camp, still feeling half drunk on the joy of slipping free. He found some berry bushes. Since his hometown buddy’d died, Will had started acting pushy, vague, and sometimes wild. Will remembered Sal and others tying him to the cot, preventing his nighttime one-boy raids on Yankees. He drifted between acting passive as a small-town debutante (“stand over there, smile”) and going haywire as any Mormon double-crossed. Some mornings, Willie woke up feeling all kitten-weak—others, he came to like a fist in boiling oil.
Only now that something decent had happened did Will start remembering how it felt: being just regular and human again. So, just before Antietam grabbed him, Will settled near blackberry bushes, was just commencing to gobble his fill. Came a sound—hoarse, buzzing past like a squirrel running on one tree limb overhead. Was then Private Willie Marsden noticed his left leg, from the knee down, had gone the red-purple of blackberries. For one second, feeling nothing bad yet, the boy told hisself, “It’s just sweet berry juice. I spilled. I spilled a lot.”
In the medic’s tent, Will was visited by the orangey-pink corporal who’d stitched him clear of prison. Crusted sleep matted the corners of Sal’s eyes. A good-sized twig stuck unnoticed in his hair. But Sal was one of those people whose grossness is part of their comedy and so is okay and—to Will now—almost dear. Yeah, “dear.” Who else was there?
Smith touched the boy’s forehead. “Free of frying pan, grabbed by fire, hunh, buddy? Sure wish I could sew it back right for you. I reckon it hurts plenty.” Sal studied the matted pant leg ripped wide open.
First, Willie, not yet thirteen—still too ready to believe in textbook braveness—shook his head No.
“Not hurt? To be shot right in your leg and it don’t smart?”
“Well, I was shot, Sal … but more across the leg.”
“Hey, this is Sal, bud. Went slam in. Bound to be paining you something fierce, why just look at the swelling. Near big as your waist.”
Willie finally nodded. He lay staring at the tent’s top. All afternoon he’d tried counting its threads. His pal’s fringe of red hair now tickled the edges of his view.
“Does,” Will admitted. “Sure hurts plenty, Sal. Burns then freezes. And you know what? It’s weak of me, I know,” here he signaled Smith closer. “There’s a black girl on our farm, name of Castalia—and I been thinking it’d sure be nice to see her face. She’s not what anybody’d call beautiful but she is. Too, I can’t help it, Sal—Momma’s real bad in emergencies but … I do … just wish … she was here …”
“Nothing more natural in the world, buddy.”
(I got to put in, child, how this tailor-farmer’s full name r
un: Salvador Cortez Drake Magellan Smith. His mother read novels. She had dreamed of a gallant son. She’d got one. She had dreamed of a handsome son. That, she hadn’t got. Willie loved looking up at Sal, whose Adam’s apple was the size of a coffee mug. Sal’s cowlicks shot out even wilder, his freckles more flapjack-scattered than Will’s own.)
“SAL?” Will now spoke real soft to his visitor, like enemies were listening. “They’ll try and take it. Off. I know they’ll want to lop it from the knee down. Sal, I really wish they wouldn’t. Sal, it just looks bad. But, hey, I’m in here. The person understands these things. If they’d just leave it on to heal, it will. Heal. But, cut clean off? nothing ever does. I’m not going to have a chance in heck, Sal, if they cut my whole blamed leg off.”
This particular day, Salvador Smith looked worn, blue-green rings ham-mocked under either eye. A letter’d awaited his return from prison.
Good news and bad news—though, as ofttimes happens, child, in my life anyways, the show-off bad outdanced the wallflower good. Still, the good sure was: After six daughters, Sal’s wife had hauled off and had twin boys. She joked she was going to “Junior” them both, naming one: Salvador Magellan Smith, the other: Cortez Drake Smith. Then the Corporal read how his farm had been foreclosed, how the one Chinese tailor left in charge of his New Bern shop had fallen in love with the alderman’s stout wife and run off with her, nobody knew where to. Missing: the shop’s cashbox and its best worsted.
The letter sketched barest facts, and Sal—tired from escaping, his mind dancing like a janglebones skeleton—made up the rest: A heavyset woman came in to have her overlong skirt altered, a lonely wife, her husband another volunteer in the 70th Carolina Regiment galloped off somewheres to the North. The happy little tailor, going down onto his hands and knees, was soon moving all around Mrs. Buxom like a toy train, his mouth—the cowcatcher—full of pins. This tidy Chinaman asked—in signs—if the woman needed her hem much shorter. She kept going, “Unh-hunh.” She begun to feel his little child-dry hands work around across betwixt her ankles. Her big eyes closed. It was, Sal imagined, toasty in that cramped work space, just the clock ticking, a slow afternoon. Pinning made gentle bites and tugs around her calves. “Shorter still?” “Unh-hunh. Hem more.” From the customer’s toplofty view, the tailor soon seemed her own favorite infant, a pet, but old enough to vote. The more he worked around her shins, the more he seemed the best thing that’d ever happen to her next. Why not? She ordered: “Hem … hem.” The tailor looked up from below. In this warm back room, the lady’s big legs come to seem columns, something to get to the tops of the bottoms of. She was the slow boat from Shanghai, masted. She was a mighty excellent kind of transportation. The snug warm berth he’d stowaway and live in forever. Up skirt went, inch by inch, slowly back the hem did turn, everywhere his hot dry fingers, soon upon her thigh, thighs. Alterations. A mouth full of warm pins got nearer actual legs. To feel a boy’s tape-measure breath on your bare innerest shanks. Pins burred like a mustache between his lips, pins thrummed words, “Shorter yet?” “Unh-hunh, baste it—baste it. Hem it, now.” In a hot rear room full of buttonholes and dummies, one thing leads to another, natural as gravity. Everything that goes down must come up. A hand here, and then to lift him, kiss a mouth with possible straight pins still living in it. Same night, well dressed, they eloped, breezing towards Florida in a rental buggy piled with a Quaker cloakroom’s worth of itchy winter cloth.